Upcoming Events

Upcoming Website Changes

Novalug.com is being upgraded and placed on a new internet architecture. This will directly change the way you can log into the site to add content or manage people and settings. During the upgrade all content, users and roles will be retained, but some files may become unlinked. An archive of all files from the old site will be made available and some files you may have uploaded may have to be re-entered in order to be visible.

This upgrade and re-architecture will be fully documented and presented at a future meeting under the working title, "Building an Enterprise like Website for Free (or very nearly so)".

So most of the free tiers of dynamic website hosting I found have tons of little hidden costs you can incur when hosting a Drupal site, so I'm calling that experiment a failure, but I'll move on with some changes to the site.

NOVALUG currently meets at NoVA-Labs the 2nd Saturday of the month at 10:00 a.m. The meetings generally last 2 hours. If people are interested in grabbing lunch afterwards, send a note to the list and organize it.

The August meeting of NOVALUG will be held in Arlington VA in support of a picnic honouring the birthday of Linux.

Originally, ARPANET ran the Network Control Program (NCP). The NCP had many limitations (including address space) and was in time superseded by TCP/IP. However, users were reluctant to make the transition. So, in 1982, Vinton Cerf and Jon Postel brutally forced users to switch from NCP to IPv4 by programming the Internet gateways to block all NCP traffic.

Now, almost 30 years later, it is the IPv4 address space that is approaching exhaustion. If current IPv4 address allocation policy continues, then IANA will allocate its last remaining /8 block in 2011 06, and the RIRs will allocate the last of their IPv4 addresses in 2012 04. Yet the demand for addresses will only grow due to the rapid proliferation of hand-held devices and the ongoing roll-out of Internet services in the third-world.

The Netfilter kernel module, popularly known as iptables, provides a
powerful and, often, very flexible toolbox for building Linux based
firewalls. While clustering Linux based firewalls may not be new, these
clusters are often not capable or configured to maintain stateful
connections during fail-over scenarios, connections such as SSL
transactions and SSH connections. By combining Netfilter with a couple
of open source projects, one can construct a cluster of Linux systems
that enable seamless firewall failover such that stateful connections
are protected and maintained.

Senior Systems Architect, Ivan Makfinsky, of Endosys, Inc., a Linux and
Open Source Software consulting company, will demonstrate how clustered,
stateful Linux based firewalls can be constructed using Red Hat
Enterprise Linux and software from the Fedora EPEL (Extra Packages for

The twenty-first century has brought with it a disturbing loss of personal privacy. Communications are routinely monitored for content and traffic analysis can be used to determine which IP addresses are exchanging meaningful amounts of traffic. Onion routing is a technique by which a subset of all network nodes are tasked with relaying encrypted traffic for clients. Tor is a widely used implementation of an onion routing protocol which defends against traffic analysis
attacks; it also implements hidden services only reachable from within the Tor darknet. Tor is endorsed by a number of human rights and advocacy organizations, including as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, and Wikileaks.org. Tor is also used by the US Department of Defense and the US Military.

Here is a brief run down of the topics to be covered:
* Talk about Linux packages briefly, zip files, tar/gz files, rpms, and debs.
* Brief, basic usage of the above (for the wee penguins)
* How to create RPMs (for the bigger penguins)
* How to create Yum repositories
* How to deploy RPM and Yum in your organization
* Common pitfalls with RPMs and Yum repositories (what not to do, how to fix the rpmdb)
* How to create deb files and apt repositories